In my experience, most legible donors don’t care about intermediate purchases and inputs until they start to be upset, and at that point, intermediate purchases and inputs are often either the cause of, or the pretext for, becoming much more upset/confirming one’s inklings of suspicion.
In part, things seem to me to go wrong because approximately everyone knows, to at least some degree, that it doesn’t make sense to have tons and tons of looming oversight and force people to burn time and attention on justifying every little thing.
But the definition of what’s “little,” or what’s “obviously justified” vs. “potentially justifiable but in need of explicit justification,” is not common/universal, so what one person thinks is business as usual, another thinks needs explaining.
And if it’s been a year or two since anyone checked, then things very quickly go from “X needs explaining” to “a pattern of extremely irresponsible spending on all sorts of Xs, resulting in Y wasted dollars over the past year.”
Especially if the bewildered response is “but I thought you trusted my judgment.”
Ok, thanks for clarifying. To me that sounds like a spectrum of “how much weirdness/lack of legibility are donors willing to tolerate w.r.t. the internals of an org”, and that might be correlated with whether a donor happens to be donating to the mission or to the agent(s).
I suspect another reason I’m struggling a bit with the idea is that although I consider myself a mission-oriented donor, I’m also having trouble coming up with an example of an intermediate input where finding out about it would cause me to be upset (immediately). Like, if MIRI purchased 50 dildos I wouldn’t blink twice because it’s not a significant expenditure relative to the organization’s size and I can think of a variety of plausible reasons that would make them a reasonable purchase. But if MIRI spent six figures on sex toys in one year I’d hope that there was an explanation, even if that was literally just “yeah these are actually inputs into research” or something like that. Maybe that still counts? It feels like the scale at which it starts to matter is also just another axis on that spectrum.
I guess it’s worth noting that the MIRI mission in particular is much less specific than the mission of e.g. an animal rights charity, or a person who has a specific project pitch? Like, “cause humanity to successfully navigate the acute risk period” is much more on the open-ended side of mission-space. For nearly any given X, it’s more plausible that it could be relevant to the MIRI mission than that it could be relevant to, say, someone who’s trying to build widgets.
In my experience, most legible donors don’t care about intermediate purchases and inputs until they start to be upset, and at that point, intermediate purchases and inputs are often either the cause of, or the pretext for, becoming much more upset/confirming one’s inklings of suspicion.
In part, things seem to me to go wrong because approximately everyone knows, to at least some degree, that it doesn’t make sense to have tons and tons of looming oversight and force people to burn time and attention on justifying every little thing.
But the definition of what’s “little,” or what’s “obviously justified” vs. “potentially justifiable but in need of explicit justification,” is not common/universal, so what one person thinks is business as usual, another thinks needs explaining.
And if it’s been a year or two since anyone checked, then things very quickly go from “X needs explaining” to “a pattern of extremely irresponsible spending on all sorts of Xs, resulting in Y wasted dollars over the past year.”
Especially if the bewildered response is “but I thought you trusted my judgment.”
“Yeah, I did.”
Ok, thanks for clarifying. To me that sounds like a spectrum of “how much weirdness/lack of legibility are donors willing to tolerate w.r.t. the internals of an org”, and that might be correlated with whether a donor happens to be donating to the mission or to the agent(s).
I suspect another reason I’m struggling a bit with the idea is that although I consider myself a mission-oriented donor, I’m also having trouble coming up with an example of an intermediate input where finding out about it would cause me to be upset (immediately). Like, if MIRI purchased 50 dildos I wouldn’t blink twice because it’s not a significant expenditure relative to the organization’s size and I can think of a variety of plausible reasons that would make them a reasonable purchase. But if MIRI spent six figures on sex toys in one year I’d hope that there was an explanation, even if that was literally just “yeah these are actually inputs into research” or something like that. Maybe that still counts? It feels like the scale at which it starts to matter is also just another axis on that spectrum.
I guess it’s worth noting that the MIRI mission in particular is much less specific than the mission of e.g. an animal rights charity, or a person who has a specific project pitch? Like, “cause humanity to successfully navigate the acute risk period” is much more on the open-ended side of mission-space. For nearly any given X, it’s more plausible that it could be relevant to the MIRI mission than that it could be relevant to, say, someone who’s trying to build widgets.
Yeah, agreed, that’s definitely part of what was making it a bit ambiguous for me.